Redshifts, Cosmology and Academic Science
Author: Halton Arp, 6"x9" paperback, 314 pages, ISBN:0-9683689-0-5
A wonderful book, Seeing Red is a must read since it is both
educational and hard-hitting while being readable and entertaining. Arp
dismantles conventional astrophysics, based on redshift being
proportional to distance, by sharing his observations on quasars,
some of which are highly redshifted yet connected to low redshifted
galaxies by material bridges. Writing eye-opening material in more
than one arena, Arp takes on the corruption of good science in
academia, government and publishing after giving us great material
concerning red shift, the Big Bang, and cosmology.
Seeing Red can be ordered
via the link below.

Three years ago, the XMM
Newton orbiting x-ray telescope witnessed a galaxy ejecting two high
redshift quasars. Early in the 24- hour observation of the active
nucleus of NGC 3516, it recorded a flare, much like a solar flare
but ten trillion times as powerful. [See link to Magnetic
Reconnection TPOD (below) for Electric Universe explanation of solar
flares.] Then two high redshift regions appeared on opposite sides
of the galactic nucleus. One side featured a spike in redshift and
the other side a similar dip in redshift--as if one spot were moving
away from us and the other coming toward us at about one tenth the
speed of light.

Of course, that's not the official interpretation of the
observations. Coming up with a credible mainstream explanation takes
a little more time than simply accepting the observation at face
value (because face value contradicts accepted theory). As the space.com press release put it, "In fact, the tell-tale observations
of NGC 3516 were made three years ago, but it took this recent
analysis to uncover the flare's secret

The mainstream interpretation of the event is that the flare
was caused by a disc of gas falling into the galaxy's central black
hole. The high redshift spots are the remnants of the decaying disc.
Their redshift is caused by the effect of the nearby gravitational
field of the black hole tugging on the light and reducing its
energy. The redshift spike and dip are caused by the orbital
velocity of the disc around the black hole, one side rotating
toward us, reducing the redshift, and the other side rotating away
from us, increasing the redshift.

Is there any way to distinguish between the two
interpretations? Actually, there's a simple way. The press release
says the researcher "suspects that the highlighted gas fell into the
unforgiving black hole just a few days after the measurements." So
if we were to point a telescope at NGC 3516 today, we should see
nothing left of the event.

But if the event was a quasar ejection, the quasars should
still be there, moving away from the galaxy core, growing brighter.
The trouble is that accepted theory already knows how to explain
away bright pairs (or more) of quasars seen across a galaxy nucleus.
These they call gravitational lensing of one distant quasar.

This isn't the first time NGC 3516 has been a player in the
redshift controversy. (see above diagram from Halton Arp's book,
_Seeing Red_). There are six high-redshift objects distributed in a
non-random manner along the spin axis of this galaxy. (The galaxy is
the oval shape in the middle of the diagram, and the direction of
the galaxy's spin axis is indicated by the diagonal line.) The
galaxy's redshift is very low: z=.009 (meaning that its light is
shifted toward the red by the fraction .009 of its wavelength). The
objects' redshifts are called out on the diagram.

When Arp began writing _Seeing Red_, there was only one
discordant object in this field, the striped ball at the top of the
picture, marked by its redshift of 0.89. This is a BL Lac object, a
very rare type of quasar. Arp had been examining the regions around
the twenty-six brightest Seyfert galaxies (galaxies that are
"active" with star formation, etc.). He discovered that five of the
brightest BL Lac objects are less than one degree away from one or
another of these 26 bright Seyferts, including this BL Lac-Seyfert
pair. Since both of these types of objects are rare (especially
being the brightest members of their classes), the chance against
these being a random association is about three million to one.

As Arp finished _Seeing Red_, the Chinese astronomer, Yoaquan
Chu, discovered five high-redshift quasars even closer to NGC 3516
than the BL Lac. Not only were these five quasars (plus the original
BL Lac) distributed along the galaxy's spin axis, but their
redshifts were ordered--the highest redshifts closest to the Seyfert
galaxy. This added valuable information about how quasars evolve
into normal low-redshift galaxies. For that, Arp called this the
Rosetta Stone of intrinsic redshift. How appropriate that it was the
same galaxy that is now caught in the act of ejecting a new pair of
quasars.